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How to make a Demo? To make a self-recording is to literally make a recording of your voice. Why would you do this? Well for some, the ideas of recording their songs and voices in a music studio are either farfetched or far off the budget for the month. Unless you find some low charging…

Favorite Android Apps for Muso’s In the days of modern technology, air guitar and digital devices – you won’t often see many of the modern musicians using a metronome or a pitch pipe. Most musicians simply find it more convenient to carry around one Android Device, which offers a myriad of options. Luckily the Google…

The rebirth of the uke Stay around long enough, and as the saying goes, what was once fashionable, and then unfashionable, becomes fashionable once more. This is certainly the case with the ukulele. This humble member of the lute family came out of Hawaii, having mutated from the Portuguese machete, a four-stringed instrument that originated…

The echo sound Although it was the Echoplex tape delay unit that defined much of the rockabilly sound throughout the 1960s, it wasn’t the first tape echo machine on the market. Sound engineers had begun to experiment in the late 1940s with units that could be used in recording studios and which were portable enough…

Marty Robbins was a country star who was propelled to super-stardom in both the country and the pop charts by what must rate as one of Nashville’s most significant productions. El Paso however very nearly never got made. Gunfighter ballads Robbins had scored four number one country hits before he started to pressure his label,…

Not many piano players have a statue dedicated to them, so the statue of Owen Bradley at Owen Bradley Park in Nashville is a significant landmark both in the city and its music. Bradley, who was born in Westmore-land, Tennessee, had started out as a piano player but morphed into a music arranger and songwriter,…

Recording Heartbreak Hotel One of the sessions that really put Nashville on the map as a recording center was Heartbreak Hotel, cut during Elvis Presley’s first session for RCA Victor after he had left Sun. There were very few recording facilities in Nashville at that time, and RCA didn’t have their own studio there. Methodists…

Harmonicas and the real McCoy Roy Orbison really hit it big with Crying, reaching number two on the national charts, but on the flip side was a song that was in sharp contrast to the Big O’s bolero style, a bluesy track that also made it up the charts, eventually hitting number 25. What really…

Historians of music like to debate on which was the first record that heralded the Nashville Sound. Some hold out for Jim Reeves’ Four Walls, recorded in February 1957. Chet Atkins, who was certainly in a position to know, backed his own production of Don Gibson’s Oh Lonesome Me, which was recorded later the same…

On Earl Scruggs’s 80th birthday, in 2004, he was described by country star Porter Wagoner as the best player of the five-string banjo there ever was. “And the best there ever will be,” Wagoner added. Bluegrass The banjo of course is one of the formative instruments in country music, and is especially identified with bluegrass….